Glass ceiling or murky waters: The gendered and racialized pathway to full professorship in Canada

Abstract

We examined the predictors of being in the rank of full professor using a sample of faculty representing English Canadian universities. We hypothesized that women have a lower likelihood of being a full professor, controlling for a range of characteristics, including length of service, discipline, number of publications and Tri-Council grants. We also explored how race and immigrant status factored into the likelihood of being a full professor. Using a sample of associate and full professors, we found evidence of a strong negative effect of the probability of being a full professor for women, even after controlling for all variables in the model. We also found evidence of a glass ceiling, where a difference in the effect of years of service was found for men and women. Finally, racialized immigrant professors had a greater likelihood of being at the rank of full professor and racialized Canadian-born professors had the least. RÉSUMÉNous avons examiné les prédicteurs de l'accession au rang de professeur titulaire à l'aide d'un échantillon de professeurs représentant des universités canadiennes anglaises. Nous avons émis l'hypothèse que les femmes

The balance between status quo and change when minorities try to access top ranks: a tale about women achieving professorship

“…However, women are less likely to obtain tenure and promotions even when controlling for productivity. This effect was found in several countries, including the USA (Treviño et al, 2018;Weisshaar, 2017), Canada (Wijesingha and Robson, 2022), Germany (Mayer and Rathmann, 2018), Sweden (Danell and Hjerm, 2013), Iceland (Heijstra et al, 2015), Japan (Takahashi and Takahashi, 2015) and Italy (De Paola et al, 2018;Filandri and Pasqua, 2021). Lutter and Schröder's (2016) study in the field of sociology in Germany was an exception, reporting positive discrimination against women.…”

The gender citation gap: Approaches, explanations, and implications

“…This disproportionately affects women because of attrition and not because of disciplinary under‐specialization (Mishra et al., 2018). Women's lower research productivity and therefore lower citations can also explain why they are underrepresented especially at higher academic ranks and as being highly prolific scholars (Fox & Nikivincze, 2021; Wijesingha & Ramos, 2017; Wijesingha & Robson, 2021), which leads to their underrepresentation in highly impactful journal (Chatterjee et al., 2021; Esarey & Bryant, 2018). All these in turn contribute to women's fewer accumulated citations.…”

The gender citation gap: Why and how it matters

“…Still, women scientists continue to face challenges. There is evidence that compared to men, women are less likely to get hired for tenure track positions (Moss‐Racusin et al., 2012; Sheltzer & Smith, 2014; but see Ceci, 2018), receive lower earnings (Leahey, 2006 Frederickson, 2018), and are less likely or take longer to achieve tenure and promotion to full professor (Ginther & Kahn, 2004; Stewart et al., 2009; Wijesingha & Robson, 2021). Women are also found to be disadvantaged across the stages of academic publishing including, for example, research collaboration (West et al., 2018; Zeng et al., 2016), peer‐reviewing (Helmer et al., 2017; Hengel, 2017), and media coverage (Shor et al., 2015; Beaulieu et al., 2017).…”